In their crusade against the Modi dispensation, the liberals had turned the New York Times (NYT) into something like a court of justice. Last week, the Right rolled up the paper and swatted them. And once again, free speech was the casualty. And this is happening repeatedly because we are unable to define how free our speech can be. What can’t be defined can’t be defended.
On August 5, the freshly patriotic NYT published a report, ‘A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul’, which made a passing mention—one sentence—on NewsClick. “In New Delhi, corporate filings show, Mr. (Neville Roy) Singham’s network financed a news site, NewsClick, that sprinkled its coverage with Chinese government talking points.” An aside: the NYT has no problem with China pumping billions of dollars into American universities, Harvard included.
The report displays a link to a NewsClick video as an example. It was put out on October 2, 2019, on the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution, and is mostly on Mao’s feats which transformed China from an agrarian to an industrial economy, a process that killed scores of millions.
The Cultural Revolution alone killed an estimated two million people, according to Frank Dikötter (The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976). And this does not include the hundreds of thousands of cats collected in sacks and smashed against pillars and walls. A pet cat was considered at that time an enemy of the State. At the same time, history is replete with instances when the State itself turned out to be an enemy of the people. Well, the video in question was boring propaganda credited to Peoples Dispatch, which claims to promote ‘fact-based’ journalism, the new god everyone swears by now. NewsClick need not have aired it at all. That they did shows they are friends with the Chinese. But does it warrant arrest, jail, sealing of the office?
In a statement to a leading Indian newspaper, Jason Pfetcher, the sole manager of Worldwide Media Holdings (WMH)—owned by Neville Roy Singham—which funded NewsClick, called the NYT report “misleading”, and said that it has “directly contributed” to the Delhi police action against several journalists on October 3. He denied the authorities’ claim that ‘Chinese government money or Chinese private money’ funded NewsClick.
The WMH was created after the sale of ThoughtWorks, a software company founded by Singham. Singham says he is not under any influence from the Chinese Communist Party or the government. When the NYT visited Singham’s office in Shanghai though, they did find some evidence of his China partisanship: “He shares the office with a Chinese media company called Maku Group, which says its objective is to ‘tell China’s story well’, a term commonly used for foreign propaganda.” But the NYT does not investigate Singham’s possible volition or duress in his co-existence with Maku Group. Or, in these times of coworking spaces, does it matter who you share your coffee machine with?
Pfetcher joined Singham to “assist” the latter “in his efforts to give away most of the proceeds he received” from the sale of ThoughtWorks, which amounted to $785 million. This was in 2017. WMH invested in NewsClick in 2018 after identifying the latter as an organisation consistent with its purposes. WMH in turn is run by People’s Support Foundation (PSF) skippered by activist Jodie Evans, Singham’s wife.
The problem for the Indian authorities is to define what is legitimate as alternative news and views, the opposite of legacy media content. Because this is where the industry is going. In the absence of any clear definition as yet, the First Information Report’s main charge necessarily is that NewsClick “circumvented” laws to channel Roy’s benefactions.
In his rebuttal, Pfetcher states that his company has done all due diligence by law. This appears to be correct, given the hawk eye of the information and broadcasting ministry and other agencies at play in all such transactions.
Pfetcher also says the NYT was unfair in its report: “PSF has never received any funding, nor taken direction from any foreign individual, organisation, political party, or government.” He added that NYT “failed to include” this denial of foreign funding and left readers to believe that the source of PSF’s funding “might have come from China, rather than from the sale of ThoughtWorks”. The statement further said, “Their salacious headlines and misleading ‘reporting’ have now directly contributed to the arrest of innocent journalists.”
The Enforcement Directorate also accuses NewsClick of downgrading the Indian government’s anti-Covid efforts, of possessing emails that intended to show Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh as disputed territories in relation to China, and of actively aiding the recent farmers’ agitation.
These are allegations. Proving any of these illegal will not be easy in a fair trial. And none of it justifies, until proven, arrests and jailing, unless India is already a closed society and patriotism is solely seen as a means of retributive punishment to those critical of the government, whose priorities keep changing. For example, prior to 2014, would China have been so dreadful an untouchable as it is now? Recall the Sabarmati scene from September 17, 2014, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping shared a swing.
Despite the relationship heading south since then, China has still not been declared an enemy state. During the BRICS summit in August, the Indian prime minister and the Chinese president met on the sidelines and discussed border and trade issues. Last week India came back from the Asian Games held in China with 107 medals; never mind that China amassed 382, surely a lesser number to a patriot.
The real question is whether India is an open society or not. If it is, alternative histories and notions of social and political justice must be discussed, not stifled in the name of patriotism. If it is hurting national interests, the wrong-doers must be subject to a fair law. There has to be a process. In not adhering to one, we are actually following in the bloody footsteps of Mao.